9/11/02

by
Susan Haack

For me at least, it is still hard to speak or even
think clearly about the terrible events of a year ago. The sheer
complexity of the tangled political, legal, military, strategic,
theological, and philosophical questions—about international politics
and the role of religion, about the goals, strategies, and costs of a new
kind of war, about religious toleration and its limits—daunts me; and
horror, fear, anger, and sadness still sometimes overwhelm me. It’s hard
even to know what words to use; “tragedy,” now worn thin by overuse,
seems inadequate, too easily allowing us to forget that we are dealing
with human evil, deliberate death and destruction prompted by resentment,
hatred, despair, fanaticism.

“Human evil”: I don’t believe God is on our
side—or anyone’s; and what follows will be thoroughly and
unapologetically humanist reflections. We humans aren’t the Chosen
Creatures, just very complicated animals. And we are divided creatures,
both intellectually and morally—made up, as Denis Diderot once wrote,
“of strength and weakness, of insight and blindness, of pettiness and
grandeur.” We are capable of remarkable intellectual and artistic
achievement, but also susceptible to superstition and obfuscation—for
“mysteries” are a balm to our uneasy sense of self-importance; and we
are capable of great kindness, but also of appalling cruelty. The dark
side of the human creature is inclined to tribalism: fear of, hostility
towards, those who are different, Not Us. This is an ancient, deep,
emotional response. Even in the modern world, it is sometimes useful, and
often enough harmless; but it can be deadly—and never more deadly than
when it is harnessed by religious fanaticism.

The perpetrators of the September 11 attacks were
Muslim fanatics. It is doubtless all to the good that, in the last year,
many of us have become at least dimly aware of differences among the
various branches of Islam, and of various subtleties of Islamic theology,
hitherto quite outside our consciousness. And of course it is important
that we remember that not all Muslims are fanatics, nor all fanatics
Muslims. But it is no less vital to recognize how religious ardor can come
to serve our darker side. Tribalism is a natural human weakness; if it is
not to destroy us, we need to understand why it grows so luxuriantly at
some times and in some cultural contexts, and how it resonates with
deprivation, despair, envy, and old resentments long nursed.

It is difficult, not to say impossible, to rank
cultures holus bolus and simpliciter as better or worse. Still, British
cooking is surely gastronomically inferior to the gloriously subtle and
versatile cuisine of India. And a culture in which some people are
enslaved is surely morally worse, in that respect, than a culture in which
all are free; a culture in which women are treated as chattels or children
is morally worse, in that respect, than a culture in which women are
accepted and treated as fully human; a culture in which people are subject
to imprisonment and punishment without trial is morally worse, in that
respect, than a culture in which they are not; and so on. To those who
maintain that God mandates that we treat women as second-class persons, or
that we root out and destroy infidels, etc., I can only reply: you are
terribly mistaken.

The better side of human nature is capable of
overcoming tribalism, of appreciating that They are no less human than We,
and of cherishing the myriad differences among individuals and the myriad
human achievements they make possible. We are fortunate to live in a
society that, for all its faults, has evolved—gradually, raggedly, and
still very, very imperfectly—towards a hospitable pluralism that
embraces this sense of our common humanity and this appreciation of
individual differences. Not that all traces of tribalism, or of religious
fanaticism, have vanished—far from it; but our history makes it at least
possible for us to see them for what they are: regressions to the darker
side of human nature.

The military, strategic, and diplomatic challenges we
face are great; and so too is the moral challenge. This challenge is
implicit in arguments about racial profiling at airports or the treatment
of Al Qaeda prisoners—how can we best defend ourselves without
sacrificing what we most value? It becomes explicit when we realize that
the terrorists, and those who condone, support, or rejoice in their
horrors, express the very tribalism from which we have so painfully and
partially liberated ourselves. How can we defend ourselves against their
tribalism without resorting to a tribalism of our own?

Many times in the last year we have heard: “Our
values are under threat.” They are; and we should—we must—defend
them. But not because they are ours; for that really would be a regression
to the dark side of human nature. If we take this thought to heart, we
shall not, as we should not, fear that in defending them we may be guilty
of a kind of cultural imperialism. And we will appreciate that, in the
deepest sense, the values at stake are not “ours”—not peculiarly
American, English, French, or even Western, but human: values, that is,
with the capacity to enhance human flourishing, and to appeal emotionally
to humans everywhere.

Today we will hold in our minds images of the
extraordinary courage of “our” heroes of 9/11—the firefighters, the
police officers, the passengers and crew of Flight 93. It would serve
humanity well if we were to dwell, also, on images of the surge of the
human spirit after the liberation of Kabul—of the young women, their
faces now visible and visibly eager, as they returned to their decayed and
damaged but now-functioning schools and to the possibility of full human
lives; and of the brave artist cleaning off the safer images he had
painted over cultural treasures to protect them from destruction by the
zealots of the Taliban.

Copyright 2002 Susan Haack.

Susan Haack is Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and
Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University
of Miami (Florida). Her reflections were presented at a campuswide Day of
Commemoration held at the University of Miami on September 11, 2002.

Copyright notice: The copyright for
the contents of this web site rests with the Council for Secular Humanism.
You may download and read the documents. Without permission, you may
not alter this information, repost it, or sell it.
If you use a document, you are encouraged to make a donation to the Council
for Secular Humanism.